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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 1, 2012
Stalking the earth
Hilton Kramer died Tuesday at age 84. A magnificent dinosaur, he maintained the niche of the public intellectual long after the "politically correct" had rendered it nearly uninhabitable. The magazine he founded, The New Criterion - still in existence after 30 years, defying laws of nature - provided a sanctuary for younger members of the species, who to this day write as if Western Civ were still a possibility, and might still be defended on its own terms.Once the art critic of the (highbrow leftist) Nation magazine, then the New York Times in an age when, as one obituarist wrote, its horizons were broader and Kramer's were narrower - Kramer arrived on the art scene as a champion of abstract expressionism. And with it, the modern tradition in art that has since collapsed into the narcissism of pure fashion statement; into the sneer, giggle, and impertinence of "coolness." To a generation of readers, Kramer explained what that tradition was, and how it worked; how it extended the whole project of western man. He made exactly the sort of cultural judgments since ruled out of bounds, and with the clarity and precision that makes nonsense impossible. Though very far from humourless, he took cultural life deadly seriously. It is a civilizing mission: something that involves truth, honesty, courage, and another of Kramer's favourite words: "rigour." He was the deadly enemy of every kind of psychologizing and posturing. His books, The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973), The Revenge of the Philistines (1985), The Twilight of the Intellectuals (1999), should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the "prehistory of postmodernism" in North America. They are brilliant eviscerations of people who, largely by capturing state-funded institutions, imposed attitudes toward art that are full of loathing for beauty itself, and for the pleasure it confers; whose preoccupations are overwhelmingly political. And yet, Kramer bestowed praise in the least likely places. For all his reputation as a destroyer, he was ever searching for living fragments of our art tradition, now gone underground. He was not despairing. Son of a Russian-immigrant Jewish tailor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and a dandy to the last, he was also among those who live their ideas. From his first acquaintance in childhood with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he seems to have known his own mission as critic and explainer. By natural endowment, he had eyes that could see; the education he acquired was in literature and philosophy. He hated politics, yet along with everyone else who hates them, he lived through our age of shallow and subverted "democracy," in which the metastasizing Nanny State compels every apolitical soul to participate in politics, just to defend the territory of the apolitical. A man of the Left, by upbringing, his journey was paralleled by many other intellectuals of his "neo-conservative" generation who, as the world shifted, found themselves on the Right. A large part of my own work consists of trying to understand how this happened: how 1950s liberals like my own father found themselves, as early as 1970, unchanged in outlook, but now nominally located out in right field. They held standards, values, things essentially non-relative. Raised themselves to be "tolerant," and "progressive," egalitarian and "inclusive," they cultivated innovations. Then hippie socialism and feminism passed them by. The moral order itself began to be inverted, and suddenly they were reactionaries, paternalists. As a child of this generation - Hilton Kramer's - I am now watching my parents and so many of their friends, going to their graves in smiling confusion, "liberals" to the end, still trying to offer their unwanted blessings on some younger generation that "means well," as it continues to follow "progress," endlessly down the road into Hell. One recalls the dinosaurs who were left high and dry, after the fall of the Bastille. Here I'm not thinking of the naive peasants, who actually believed they would soon be receiving the property that would be taken from the rich (a promise that still gets evil politicians elected). Rather, I'm thinking of the "worthy bourgeois," of those not entirely stupid, who expected "reform," and got Revolution. These were educated men and women, who never imagined their whole world could be upended, and everything of value to them cut away. Yet they were promptly lowered into a fever swamp of moral, intellectual, and physical squalor: all of it "inconceivable." Kramer, with whom I often disagreed on the very aesthetic questions on which I found him most enlightening, was a worthy bourgeois, but in a more heroic sense. He didn't take the " '60s Revolution" lying down, but fought it. He thought and felt himself into the proper reactionary position toward it. He did not go to his grave with that smiling (and somewhat frightened) "tolerance" on his face, which may also bespeak idiocy. He shored up fragments from that antediluvian world, of Western Civ. The task of his survivors is to reassemble them - which may sound like putting Humpty Dumpty back together. It is indeed a task mere humans can't accomplish. Instead, as we may be reminded on this Palm Sunday, it begins with acknowledging our Master again; with discerning his entry into our unhappy city, and laying our cloaks before Him. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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